§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ American Traditions

§ People and Ideas

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Thursday, October 20, 2011

When An Intellectual Elite Controls Society

Belief in materialistic determinism, the secularist philosophical basis of liberal-progressive-socialism, fosters collectivistic tyranny. Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are following a well-worn trail leading inevitably in that direction.

Judeo-Christian morality, arising from spiritual religious struggles to understand the Will of God for individuals within society, is the opposite of liberal-progressive-socialistic determinism. The one deals with individual responsibility. The other deals with economic, cultural, and racial classes, presuming the right to impose its will upon them.

Judeo-Christian morality is the historical substance of Western civilization, dominant from the time of Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD.

Judeo-Christianity’s essential aspect is recognition that every individual must answer to God for his actions, that every individual must strive always to do the right thing in dealing with his fellows. Its political culmination was the English Glorious Revolution of 1689 that established the unwritten constitutional principle that even the monarch is subject to the higher law of God’s morality, that infringing upon individuals’ inherent personal liberties is grounds for forfeiture of his rulership. Upon that foundation was our own Constitution based a century later.

Judeo-Christianity was unchallenged until the advent of scientistic, i.e., unscientific, socialism irrupting in the 1789 French Revolution, which introduced the Reign of Terror as an instrument of state political tyranny and culminated in Napoleon’s military conquest of Continental Europe. Subsequent manifestations were the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, followed by the Bolshevik ascendency in Russia’s 1917 communist revolution and Hitler’s National Socialism in 1933.

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1872 described what life was to be under Karl Marx’s so-called scientific socialism, the progenitor of today’s liberal-progressivism espoused by the Democrat/Socialist Party: